Iconic Images: Openings to the Numinous: A Lecture With John Hayes

Mostly we make idols, projection screens of our complexes, conflicts, and desires. And our experience of reality is narrow and cramped. But when we can know the world rather as icon, we see beyond the surface, beyond our projections, and through that open window, glimpse the really real reality intimating its dense complexity, fathomless depths, and terrible beauty. This relational seeing brings seer and seen to a truer sense of being and identity and opens the mind and the heart.

-- John Hayes

Jung lamented the West’s disastrous alienation from the unconscious sacred dimension of the psyche. He used the term “numinous” almost a hundred times in the Collected Works to refer to those unbidden experiences of the sacred in the psyche, experiences that are often overwhelming, paradoxically attractive and frightening intimations to the conscious ego of the presence of greater non-egoic reality.

The numinous is necessarily mediated by images from the unconscious, images not of our ego’s creation, but iconic images that serve as openings to that greater psychic reality.  Both Jung and William James described numinous experience as both destabilizing and expanding consciousness; these experiences act as catalyst to individuation.

In this lecture, we will describe how iconic images create openings to the numinous dimension of the psyche and why these experiences are an imperative corrective to both the individual and the collective psyche.

John Michael Hayes is a Jungian analyst who has had a long and varied career as a psychologist/psychoanalyst in the Baltimore-Washington area. He is currently Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and Faculty and Training and Supervising Analyst at Washington Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute. He also serves on the faculty and is Dean of Candidates at the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association (NY). John also holds degrees in theology and is a priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. His private analytic practice is in Baltimore.