2024 is considered the centennial anniversary year for Surrealism: In 1924, the French writer and co-founder of the surrealist movement, André Breton, wrote the first Surrealist Manifesto. Drawing upon the exploding cultural interest in unconscious phenomena at the time, he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism." In the wake of World War I, the irrational aspects of the psyche were becoming recognized as powerful and capable of great destruction, as well as creativity. Both forces, framed as Thanatos and Eros by Freud, could lead to enormous cultural changes. Breton, as principal theorist, led a revolution in the arts and humanities that gained momentum in the years between the two world wars; he was strongly influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud.

The list of 20th century artists who identified with this movement is extraordinary. Early on a few of the notables included Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Jean Arp, Salvador Dali, Leonora Carrington, Méret Oppenheim, Yves Tanguy, Piet Mondrian, Man Ray, Giorgio de Chirico, among many others. Although in his writings Jung did not generally express much interest in surrealism, he did own a painting by Yves Tanguy, which he discussed in his essay on flying saucers (CW 10, par.748-756 and Plate IV, also see van den Berk chapter 9, 2012).

Initially, few women were recognized as artists but were treated by the men as muses. However, over time, a group of them became more assertive, claiming independent roles as artists themselves. These included, in addition to the women already mentioned, figures such as Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, Dorthea Tanning, Léonor Fini, and Kay Sage among others (for more details see Chadwick 2021). A number of these women became interested in spirituality and the occult. Particularly Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, who became close friends when both were working in Mexico in the 1940s while also feminizing surrealism as a part of their own individuation journeys. In their art they increasingly explored themes from myth, alchemy, the occult, and especially the Tarot. Carrington designed her own deck. Not surprisingly, the richness of Jung’s thought on these topics became increasingly relevant for them.

The burgeoning fascination with surrealist women painters over the past several years has been remarkable. For example, in 2022, the 59th Venice Biennale was entitled The Milk of Dreams, a theme taken directly from a set of surrealist stories that Carrington wrote for her children (2017). The Art Institute of Chicago, the following year, held an exhibition of the work of Remedios Varo entitled Science Fictions, which included much of her alchemical artworks (Haskell and Arcq, 2023).

During this centennial year 2024, there have been major exhibitions around the world celebrating 100 years of surrealist art. The city of Brussels, one of the early centers of surrealism, has had several shows this year. These include the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium’s exhibition “Imagine! 100 Years of International Surrealism,” as well as “Histoire de ne pas rire (a story not to be laughed at) Surrealism in Belgium” at the Center for Fine Arts (BOZAR). There are also museums in Brussels devoted to the work of René Magritte, a Belgian native son. To commemorate this anniversary year, the New York Times ran an article in March that included a list of 11 different impressive international venues hosting shows dedicated to surrealism. Those noted here, along with a variety of other exhibitions, point to the ongoing vitality of the movement and its continuing developments and transformations flowing through the current moment and into the future.

To link this with Jungian psychology, we can look just prior to the surrealist emergence in the arts. In Zürich the nihilistic and antiesthetic Dadaist movement emerged and flourished around 1916; it was subsequently replaced by surrealism in the 1920s.  Although Jung was skeptical of the movement, it did coincide with the growing recognition of the loss of a spiritual center in Western societies announced by Nietzsche as the death of god. The impact of WWI only intensified this disconnection from the spiritual. In 1917, during the war, in a lecture at Munich University by the sociologist Max Weber entitled “Science as a Vocation,” he proclaimed that Western societies had undergone a “disenchantment of the world” (Weber 1946). His claim was closely linked with the loss of meaning in modern society and quite similar to Jung’s concerns about the “despiritualization” of Western cultures in conjunction with the rise of science as the explanatory paradigm of reality. In discussing this, Jung concludes:

If the historical process of world despiritualization continues as hitherto, then everything of a divine or daemonic character outside us must return to the psyche, to the inside of the unknown man, whence it apparently originated (CW 11, par. 141).

The links between Weber and Jung have recently been carefully articulated by Roderick Main in his new book on Breaking the Spell of Disenchantment (2022). Main shows how a panentheist reading of Jung is consistent with the movement towards a re-enchantment of the world. Key to such a contemporary renewal of the spirit, according to Main, is the role of alchemy, especially as envisioned by Jung in Mysterium Conunctionis (CW 14), drawing particularly upon the work of Gerhard Dorn.

Jung’s later writings, starting with his articulation of the psychoid dimension of the archetypes in “On the Nature of the Psyche” (CW8) in 1947, expand his vision of the psyche to more overtly include subjective and objective components. If archetypes structure not only human minds but nature itself, as proposed, then the internalization of the “divine or daemonic” aspect of reality mentioned above is no longer sufficient. Instead, we must look towards a more inclusive way of experiencing ourselves in the world, as a part inseparable from the whole.

Jung’s expansion of the concept of the archetype to include a psychoid aspect was in part due to his evolving understanding of synchronistic experience. Together with Wolfgang Pauli, he realized such events required a level of interconnection between subjective, inner worlds and objective reality previously unimagined by science. Although not articulated overtly, the inclusion of the psychoid in the framework of synchronicity can be seen to foster a re-enchantment of science and even of the world. This has not been fully accomplished but is a potential result of the efforts underway in many disciplines to re-envision our understanding of reality. Jung’s contributions are currently being assessed within this framework. Here his work joins with the revaluing of the early artistic visionary women of surrealism with their imaginative creations in recognition of the shared search for re-enchantment (O’Rawe 2018). These links together with the prophetic aspects of their contributions, pointing to the changes underway now in the 21st century, are only likely to grow as we move into the future.

References:

Carrington, Leonora. The Milk of Dreams. New York: NYR Children’s Collection, 2017.

Chadwick, Whitney. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, 2nd Ed. New York: Thames and Hudson, Inc., 2021.

Jung, C. G. “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 10. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958, 1970.

Jung, C. G. “Psychology and Religion,” The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 11. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1940,1969.

Jung, C. G. “On the Nature of the Psyche,” The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 11. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947, 1954.

Haskell, C. and Arcq, T, Eds. Remedios Varo: Science Fictions. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023.

Main, Roderick. Breaking the Spell of Disenchantment. Asheville, N.C.: Chiron Publications, 2022.

O’Rawe, Ricki. “The Re-enchantment of Surrealism: Remedios Varo’s Visionary Artists,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 95:5, p.533-561, 2018.

Van den Berk, Tjeu. Jung on Art. Hove, U.K., and New York: Routledge, 2012.

Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation,” From Max Weber, translated and edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Free Press, 1946.

Joseph Cambray, Ph.D., is the Past President and CEO of Pacifica Graduate Institute and Past President of the International Association for Analytical Psychology.  He has served as the U.S. Editor for The Journal of Analytical Psychology and is on various editorial boards. He was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, Center for Psychoanalytic Studies, and former President of the C.G. Jung Institute of Boston.

Dr. Cambray is a Jungian analyst, now living in the Santa Barbara area of California. His many publications include the book based on his Fay Lectures: Synchronicity: Nature and Psyche in an Interconnected Universe; a recent volume edited with Leslie Sawin, Research in Analytical Psychology,  Volume 1: Applications from Scientific, Historical, and (Cross)-Cultural Research; and an earlier volume with Linda Carter, Analytical Psychology: Contemporary Perspectives in Jungian Psychology. He has published numerous book chapters and papers in a range of international journals.