Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism

Last updated

The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) is an encyclopedic collection of archetypal images consisting of photographs of works of art, ritual images, and artifacts of sacred traditions and contemporary art from around the world. The archive is hosted by National ARAS, with institutional members in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Contents

Overview

The ARAS archive contains about 17,000 photographic images collected over more than sixty years, each accompanied by scholarly commentary. [1] The commentary includes a description of the image with a cultural history that places it in context historically and geographically, an important aspect for understanding and working with archetypal images. Where applicable, the commentary brings the image into focus for its modern psychological and symbolic meaning, as well as often including a bibliography for related reading and a glossary of technical terms.

The archive has physical repositories in the cities of its institutional-member hosts; it is also available online (online access does require a subscription) and images are indexed with keywords, including historical, cultural, geographic and other useful terms.[ citation needed ] ARAS also publishes a quarterly online journal connecting art, culture and depth psychology from a multi-disciplinary perspective that can be subscribed to free of charge on their website, aras.org.

Usage

The ARAS archive is designed for and used by students and scholars for research, by artists and designers as a sourcebook of motifs and iconographic forms, by individuals interested in commonalities in mythology, dream imagery, and vision which transcend nation and ideology, and by practitioners of depth psychology or other psychological perspectives wanting to enhance their knowledge of archetypal symbolism. [2]

Among the scholars who have visited or made use of ARAS' resources are Erich Neumann, who in his The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (Princeton, 1955) mined ARAS for images of ancient goddesses to explore the archetype of the feminine as it evolved over the centuries from ancient Sumeria and Egypt into the modern era.[ citation needed ] Two volumes have been published containing a small fraction of the images held by ARAS, entitled An Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism.[ citation needed ]

History

ARAS was begun—and built to over six thousand images—by spiritualist and scholar Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, who founded the Eranos conferences in 1933. [3] Each conference had a theme, and Fröbe-Kapteyn collected images to illustrate the topic of each year's meeting. In 1946, Olga Froebe-Kapteyn gave her collection of pictorial artifacts to the Warburg Institute in London, and photographic duplicates were given to the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich and to the Bollingen Foundation in New York. The collection in New York was edited and further developed, including collection, sorting, and classification of the material and the development of detailed study sheets for every image. This New York archive was eventually renamed the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism and was acquired by the C.G. Jung Foundation of New York (mirror collections exist at the C.G. Jung Institutes in San Francisco and Los Angeles). The close association of ARAS with the Jung Institutes is "not because a symbolic point of view is limited to Jungians, but because Jung was the particular proponent of a broadly archetypal point of view that insists upon transpersonal and symbolic connections transcending cultural and theological boundaries. This perspective lies at the heart of the archive." [4]

ARAS contains more than 17,000 images from every era of human history, from the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras, from ancient India, Asia Minor, Egypt, and Mycenae, from small tribal societies to great empires. The study sheets that accompany each image provide a detailed description of the image, a cultural history to place it in context, an archetypal commentary which examines the image's modern psychological meaning and offers numerous cross-cultural references to related concepts/images, a bibliography for related reading, and a glossary of technical terms. This detailed documentation renders the library of images accessible to the lay person as well as the specialist scholar, although as the ARAS homepage notes, "There is...no supposition among those working in this field that they have found the one and only way of interpreting archetypal symbolism. The symbol is forever recreating itself anew in the imaginations of those who experience it." [4]

ARAS online

While for many years the archive was accessible only by personal visit to one of the three locations, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, the digitization of the archive has made it accessible to anyone with a computer connected through a web browser to the Internet. [2] ARAS online is built over a powerful search engine accessible through an intuitive user interface, and aided by reference features such as the ARAS cultural timeline. This timeline shows the selected images placed in historical time, and a click on the "live" marker for a particular image opens that image and its descriptive content.

ARAS online content is available only to members. Membership costs $100 a year. [5] ARAS also have a presence on social media and is a non-profit organisation. [6]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carl Jung</span> Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist (1875–1961)

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology.

The concept of an archetype appears in areas relating to behavior, historical psychology, and literary analysis.

Collective unconscious refers to the unconscious mind and shared mental concepts. It is generally associated with idealism and was coined by Carl Jung. According to Jung, the human collective unconscious is populated by instincts, as well as by archetypes: ancient primal symbols such as The Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Shadow, the Tower, Water, and the Tree of Life. Jung considered the collective unconscious to underpin and surround the unconscious mind, distinguishing it from the personal unconscious of Freudian psychoanalysis. He believed that the concept of the collective unconscious helps to explain why similar themes occur in mythologies around the world. He argued that the collective unconscious had a profound influence on the lives of individuals, who lived out its symbols and clothed them in meaning through their experiences. The psychotherapeutic practice of analytical psychology revolves around examining the patient's relationship to the collective unconscious.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Analytical psychology</span> Jungian theories

Analytical psychology is a term coined by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, to describe research into his new "empirical science" of the psyche. It was designed to distinguish it from Freud's psychoanalytic theories as their seven-year collaboration on psychoanalysis was drawing to an end between 1912 and 1913. The evolution of his science is contained in his monumental opus, the Collected Works, written over sixty years of his lifetime.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marie-Louise von Franz</span> Swiss psychologist and scholar (1915-1998)

Marie-Louise von Franz was a Swiss Jungian psychologist and scholar, known for her psychological interpretations of fairy tales and of alchemical manuscripts.

The anima and animus are a syzygy of dualistic, Jungian archetypes among the array of other animistic parts within the Self in Jungian psychology, described in analytical psychology and archetypal psychology, under the umbrella of transpersonal psychology. The Jungian parts of the Self are a priori part of the infinite set of archetypes within the collective unconscious. Modern Jungian clinical theory under the analytical/archetypal -psych framework considers a syzygy-without-its-partner like yin without yang: countertransference reveals that logos and/or eros are in need of repair through a psychopomp, mediating the identified patient's Self; this theoretical model is similar to positive psychology's understanding of a well-tuned personality through something like a Goldilocks principle.

The child archetype is a Jungian archetype, first suggested by psychologist Carl Jung. In more recent years, author Caroline Myss has suggested that the child, out of the four survival archetypes, is present in all humans. According to Myss, its presence ranges from "childish to childlike longing for the innocent, regardless of age" and comprises sub-archetypes: "wounded child", "abandoned or orphan child", "dependent child", "magical/innocent child", "nature child", "divine child", and "eternal child".

Eranos is an intellectual discussion group dedicated to humanistic and religious studies, as well as to the natural sciences which has met annually in Moscia, the Collegio Papio and on the Monte Verità in Ascona, Switzerland since 1933.

Depth psychology refers to the practice and research of the science of the unconscious, covering both psychoanalysis and psychology. It is also defined as the psychological theory that explores the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious, as well as the patterns and dynamics of motivation and the mind. The theories of Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, and Alfred Adler are all considered its foundations.

Archetypal psychology was initiated as a distinct movement in the early 1970s by James Hillman, a psychologist who trained in analytical psychology and became the first Director of the Jung Institute in Zurich. Hillman reports that archetypal psychology emerged partly from the Jungian tradition whilst drawing also from other traditions and authorities such as Henry Corbin, Giambattista Vico, and Plotinus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Psychological astrology</span> Astrology based on psychology

Psychological astrology, or astropsychology, is the result of the cross-fertilisation of the fields of astrology with depth psychology, humanistic psychology and transpersonal psychology. There are several methods of analyzing the horoscope in the contemporary psychological astrology: the horoscope can be analysed through the archetypes within astrology or the analyses can be rooted in the psychological need and motivational theories. There might exist other astrological methods and approaches rooted in psychology. Astrologer and psychotherapist Glenn Perry characterises psychological astrology as "both a personality theory and a diagnostic tool".

Puer aeternus in mythology is a child-god who is eternally young. In the analytical psychology of Carl Jung, the term is used to describe an older person whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level, which is also known as "Peter Pan syndrome", a more recent pop-psychology label. In Jung's conception, the puer typically leads a "provisional life" due to the fear of being caught in a situation from which it might not be possible to escape. The puer covets independence and freedom, opposes boundaries and limits and tends to find any restriction intolerable.

Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn was a Dutch spiritualist, theosophist, and scholar who gained recognition in the 1920s. She lived in Switzerland for most of her life.

<i>The Collected Works of C. G. Jung</i> Book series compiling the works of Carl Jung

The Collected Worksof C. G. Jung is a book series containing the first collected edition, in English translation, of the major writings of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung.

Jungian archetypes are a concept from psychology that refers to a universal, inherited idea, pattern of thought, or image that is present in the collective unconscious of all human beings. The psychic counterpart of instinct, archetypes are thought to be the basis of many of the common themes and symbols that appear in stories, myths, and dreams across different cultures and societies. Some examples of archetypes include those of the mother, the child, the trickster, and the flood, among others. The concept of archetypes and the collective unconscious was first proposed by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

A Jungian scholar, Mayes has produced the first book-length studies in English on the pedagogical applications of Jungian and post-Jungian psychology, which is based on the work of Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). Jungian psychology is also called analytical psychology. Mayes' work, situated in the humanities and depth psychology, is thought to offer an alternative to the social sciences model.

<i>The Great Mother</i> 1955 book by Erich Neumann

The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype is a book discussing mother goddesses by the psychologist Erich Neumann. The dedication reads, "To C. G. Jung friend and master in his eightieth year". Although Neumann completed the German manuscript in Israel in 1951, The Great Mother was first published in English in 1955. The work has been seen as an enduring contribution to the literature inspired by Jung, and was the first to analyze an archetype with such depth and scope.

Joseph Lewis Henderson was an American physician and a Jungian psychologist. Called by some the “Dean of American analytical psychologists", he was a co-founder of the C.G. Jung Institute in San Francisco and continued in private practice into his 102nd year. When he died, at the age of 104, he was "the last of the first generation of Jungian analysts who had their primary analysis with Jung."

Edward F. Edinger was a medical psychiatrist, Jungian analyst and American writer.

The theories of Carl Jung are grounded in his evolutionary conception of human brain evolution. This had led to a resurgence of research into his work, beginning in the early 2000s, from the perspective of contemporary neuroscience. Much of this work looks at Jung's theories of a genetically inherited 'collective unconscious' common to all of humankind. This hypothesis was postulated by Jung in his efforts to account for similar patterns of behaviour and symbolic expression in myth, dream imagery and religion in various cultures around the world. Jung believed that the 'collective unconscious' was structured by archetypes - that is species typical patterns of behaviour and cognition common to all humans. Contemporary researchers have postulated such recurrent archetypes reside in 'environmentally closed' subcortical brain systems that evolved in the human lineage prior to the emergence of self-consciousness and the uniquely human self-reflective ego.

References

  1. "Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS)". Taschen. Archived from the original on 6 February 2017. Retrieved 5 February 2017.
  2. 1 2 "About ARAS". The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism. Retrieved September 28, 2022.
  3. "Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism". Artstor . Retrieved 5 February 2017.
  4. 1 2 Gronning, Torben; Singer, Thomas; Sohl, Patricia (September 2007). "A.R.A.S. Archetypal Symbolism and Images". Visual Resources . XXIII (3): 245–267. doi:10.1080/01973760701450983. S2CID   191348952.
  5. "Join | ARAS". aras.org. Retrieved 2018-01-10.
  6. Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism on Facebook .